What is a blog?

A blog is a modern way of expression on internet. The word blog comes from putting together the words web and log. A blog is a page on internet that is constantly being updated with new information. It is made by a person with a specific purpose. There are blogs with just pictures and videos others might be based on news articles, technology or just for educational purposes. They express ideas and opinions and might also take the format of a personal diary.

At its start, blogging was mainly a platform for personal expression. A blog or a web-log was meant to be an online diary, journal or log for those who wanted to express themselves online. It has now emerged as one of the most powerful means of sharing information on the internet. Blogging has emerged as a specialized industry in itself and is increasingly being used by individuals and enterprises alike for establishing and enhancing their online presence. This article explores the many advantages of blogging.

Business Blogging

Businesses around the world are increasingly leveraging the power of blogging to enhance their online presence. Below are some of the benefits of blogging for businesses:

Business Blogging Advantage 1: Quick and Easy to Start

A blog is much easier to start as compared to a business website. Its inherent informality allows a creative freedom to express without the constraint of a corporate tone and messaging style. There are plenty of free and paid blogging platforms available and tons of templates to choose from.

Business Blogging Advantage 2: Easy Integration

A business blog is relatively easy to integrate into your already existing website – either as a sub-domain or as a section of the site. If you started a blog on a third-party platform, you can either interlink the two or migrate your blog to your domain relatively easily.

Business Blogging Advantage 3: Marketing and Communication

A blog provides yet another marketing and communication vehicle for a business. Whether it is an informal message from the CEO, accomplishment of a team member or a channel for business messaging, a blog can add a new dimension to your marketing communication. Easy tracking performance of your blog, visitor activity and feedback measurement allows you to understand how your blog is performing.

Business Blogging Advantage 4: Flexibility

You can use a blog as the CEO's voice, corporate messaging channel or a platform for your team to express themselves professionally. You can even use it to announce internal developments within the company that would typically not have found their way into the company website. A blog can serve a wide range of needs, whether it is congratulating a team member on a new baby or announcing a new business tie-up.

Business Blogging Advantage 5: Thought Leadership

An active business blog projects the personality of the organization. Whether it is potential business associates, clients, employees, or investors, a good business blog can help you build thought leadership and credibility of your organization.

Business Blogging Advantage 6: SEO Benefits

A well written blog post on a good blog can attract visitors from search engines. Your blog can rank for a number of keywords that your business website does not rank for. New visitors drawn to your blog through these keywords can be directed to your business website, thereby increasing your business footprint, reach and awareness.

Personal Blogging

Blogging Advantage 1: Develop Research and Writing Skills

Aspiring writers and researchers can develop their skills when they start a blog. A good blogger does considerable amount of research to provide accurate and authentic information to readers. Over a period of time, this helps bloggers develop their research skills. As you write blog posts and get feedback, your blog writing and communication skills would also improve, as you find new ways of communicating and engaging your readers.

Blogging Advantage 2: Build an Online Body of Work

Regardless of the industry you belong to, prospective employers and associates who visit your blog would see it as your online body of work. Your blog can give you an edge over potential competitors and help you build your brand image, even when you have never met or interacted with the reader.

Blogging Advantage 3: Establish Initiative

Your blog, its quality and coverage of topics would help you establish initiative, interest and a proactive attitude in the minds of readers.

Blogging Advantage 4: Attract New Readers

Well written blog posts will rank well in search results, attracting new visitors to your blog. This in turn will help you widen your reader base and reach.

Blogging Advantage 5: Network and Connect

As new visitors and readers reach your blog, your base of followers will increase. Comments and feedback will help you connect to new people, potential associates, clients or employers.

Blogging Advantage 6: A Source of Income

A successful and well-read blog can be a cash-cow. If you are able to build a high-quality blog that attracts lots of readers and followers, you can monetize your blog through advertising revenue.

Whether you are an individual or a business, a blog has become a prominent and potent tool for increasing your online reach. The quality of the blog, frequency of post, performance in search results, interaction and engagement with your reader base are key factors that will determine how successful your blog is, and the benefits that can accrue through blogging.

History

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.

Blogs have become an integral part of online culture.

Practically everyone reads blogs now, whether they’re “official” news blogs associated with traditional news media, topic-based blogs related to one’s work or hobbies, or blogs purely for entertainment, just about anyone you ask has at least one favorite blog.

But it wasn’t always so. Blogs have a relatively short history, even when compared with the history of the Internet itself.

And it’s only in the past five to ten years that they’ve really taken off and become an important part of the online landscape.

The Early Years

It’s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren’t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage.

It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was coined. The word’s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.

1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site, when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

“Weblog” was shortened to “blog” in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It’s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year.

The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn’t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren’t any other options to begin with.

During these early years, a few different “blogging” platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites.

And then, in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.

The Growth Period

The early 2000s were a period of growth for blogs. In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet. By the middle of 2006, there were 50 million blogs according to Technorati‘s State of the Blogosphere report. To say that blogs experienced exponential growth is a bit of an understatement.

Political blogs were some of the most popular early blogs. Some political candidates started using blogs during this time period, including Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.

One important event in the rise of blogging was when bloggers focused on the comments U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said regarding U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond in 2002. Lott, while praising Thurmond, stated that the U.S. would have been better off if Thurmond had been elected President in 1948. During that race, Thurmond was a strong supporter of racial segregation (though his position changed later in his political career). The mainstream media didn’t pick up on the comments and their potential implications until after bloggers broke the story.

An early milestone in the rise in importance of blogs came in 2002, when many bloggers focused on comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Senator Lott, at a party honoring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, praised Senator Thurmond by suggesting that the United States would have been better off had Thurmond been elected president. Lott's critics saw these comments as a tacit approval of racial segregation, a policy advocated by Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign. This view was reinforced by documents and recorded interviews dug up by bloggers. Though Lott's comments were made at a public event attended by the media, no major media organizations reported on his controversial comments until after blogs broke the story. Blogging helped to create a political crisis that forced Lott to step down as majority leader.

In-depth topic blogs were also becoming more popular during this time. They often delved much deeper into current news and pop culture than mainstream media sources, in addition to commenting directly on what traditional media was reporting.

The impact of these stories gave greater credibility to blogs as a medium of news dissemination. Though often seen as partisan gossips, bloggers sometimes lead the way in bringing key information to public light, with mainstream media having to follow their lead. More often, however, news blogs tend to react

to material already published by the mainstream media. Meanwhile, an increasing number of experts blogged, making blogs a source of in-depth analysis.

By 2001, there was enough interest in blogging that some how-to articles and guides started cropping up. Now, “meta blogs” (blogs about blogging) make up a sizable portion of the most popular and successful blogs out there.

A number of popular blogs got their start in the early 2000s, including Boing Boing, Dooce, Gizmodo, Gawker (the first major gossip blog to launch), Wonkette, and the Huffington Post. Weblogs, Inc. was started by Jason Calacanis in 2003, and was then sold to AOL for $25 million. It was that sale that helped to cement blogs as a force to be reckoned with rather than just a passing fad.

A couple of major blogging platforms got their start in the early 2000s. Version 1.0 of Movable Type was released in September of 2001.

WordPress was started in 2003, though parts of its development date back to 2001. TypePad was also released in 2003, based on Movable Type.

Some peripheral services to the blogosphere also started in the early 2000s. Technorati, the first major blog search engine, was launched in 2002. Audioblogger, the first major podcasting service, was founded in 2003. The first video blogs started in 2004, more than a year before YouTube was founded.

Also launched in 2003 was the AdSense advertising platform, which was the first ad network to match ads to the content on a blog. AdSense also made it possible for bloggers without huge platforms to start making money from when they first started blogging (though payments to low-traffic blogs weren’t very large).

Once bloggers started making money from their blogs, the number of meta blogs skyrocketed. Bloggers like Darren Rowse (of Problogger.net and Digital-Photography-School.net) and John Chow made sizable amounts of money telling other bloggers how they could turn blogging into a full-time career.

One early event that highlighted the rising importance of blogs was the firing of Heather Armstrong, the blogger behind Dooce, for comments posted on her blog regarding her employer. This event happened in 2002, and sparked a debate over privacy issues, that still haven’t been sufficiently put to rest by 2011.

“Dooced” became a slang term to describe being fired from one’s job for something you’ve written on your blog, and has made appearances in Urban Dictionary, and even on Jeopardy!

Blogs Reach the Mainstream

By the mid-2000s, blogs were reaching the mainstream. In January of 2005, a study was released saying that 32 million Americans read blogs. At the time, it’s more than ten percent of the entire population. The same year, Garrett M. Graff was granted White House press credentials, the first blogger ever to do so.

A number of mainstream media sites started their own blogs during the mid to late 2000s, or teamed up with existing blogs to provide additional coverage and commentary. By 2004, political consultants, candidates, and mainstream news organizations all began using blogs more prominently. They provided the perfect vehicle for broadcasting editorial opinion and reaching out to readers and viewers.

Mainstream media sources are also teaming up with existing blogs and bloggers, rather than just setting out on their own. Take, for example, the regular posts on CNN.com from Mashable editors and writers. Another good example is the purchase of TechCrunch and associated blogs by AOL, which, while not a traditional media source, is one of the oldest internet companies still in existence.

During this time, the number of blogs grew even more, with more than 152 million blogs active by the end of 2010. Virtually every mainstream news source now has at least one blog, as do many corporations and individuals.

Note:

*Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system.

*Difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator.

*GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS (now GXS) that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999.

*A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log into the system using a terminal program.